by Saul Black
“Mom, what happened? Are you hurt?”
Joanna didn’t say anything. The tiny bathroom was filling up with steam.
“Mom where is it? Where are you hurt?”
Joanna yanked the dress over her head. She wasn’t wearing any bra or panties. She was shaking.
“I’m not hurt,” she said. “Oh God, Abby. Oh God.” She covered her face with her trembling hands. The unstained boot was still on. “Shit,” Joanna whispered, behind her hands. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Please tell me what’s wrong,” Abigail said.
Joanna uncovered her face. Her green eyes were alive and desperate, her skin moist. She put a hand on Abigail’s shoulder for balance as she lifted her leg to unzip and pull off the boot. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “I’m so fucking stupid. Let me … I need to get in.”
She pulled back the curtain and stepped into the tub for the shower. But a moment later she whipped the curtain open again, stepped out, and pushed past Abigail. She dropped to her knees and threw up in the toilet.
Abigail, as she had many times before, held her mother’s head. It was a strange thing, she supposed, to know the weight of your mother’s head like that, the way it felt with heat in the bone and the brain inside and vomit coming out of the mouth.
* * *
The next day Joanna didn’t leave the house. Nor did she tell Abigail what had happened. All she would say was that there had been an accident and someone had got hurt.
At the club?
No. Afterward. At a friend’s place.
What friend?
Just a friend. Jesus Christ. Stop interrogating me.
Joanna was horribly alert. She couldn’t sit still. She called Zeke twenty times, but he didn’t answer.
* * *
On the morning of the following day, Abigail woke to find her mother gone. All her clothes were still there. Only her purse and the jacket were missing.
Abigail walked up and down in the apartment. She spent an hour at the window, looking out into the wet streets, where slivers of frozen slush remained, dirtied by the traffic.
It had been dark for an hour when Joanna came back. Her hair was damp and Abigail could smell the cold on her skin. Joanna went straight to the bedroom and took the battered Nike tote bag from the wardrobe.
“Pack your clothes,” she said to Abigail.
“Where are we going?”
“Never mind. Just do it.”
“Mom, I don’t—”
“For Christ’s sake just do as I tell you!” Joanna screamed.
There was a knock at the door. Joanna froze. Grabbed Abigail and put her finger to her lips.
More knocking. Louder this time. Then a man’s voice:
“Police, open up.”
Joanna stared at Abigail, not seeing her.
“Joanna, for God’s sake we know you’re in there. We just watched you come in. Don’t make us break it down.”
Joanna exhaled, heavily, as if she’d been holding her breath for a long time. She straightened up, smiled at Abigail, sadly, then went to open the door.
It was just one guy, with his badge held out. He wasn’t in uniform. He was slightly shorter than Joanna, with broad shoulders and narrow black eyes. He looked like a Native American who’d cut off his long hair and forced himself into regular clothes. His face was slightly pockmarked on the left side. He had beautiful hands and a big wristwatch like the ones divers wore. Abigail wondered why he’d said “we.”
“Detective Garner, Homicide,” he said. “Need to ask you some questions.”
“About what?” Joanna said.
“About Tuesday night.”
Pause.
“Joanna, we know you were there. We can talk here or we can talk at the station. Up to you.”
Joanna let him in. The detective saw Abigail standing in the bedroom doorway. He smiled at her, showing perfectly straight white teeth. The smile changed his whole face.
“Playing hooky?” he said.
“She’s sick,” Joanna said, closing the front door. “Honey, go in the bedroom while I talk to the detective.”
* * *
In the bedroom Abigail sat on the unmade bed staring at the worn gray carpet, listening to the murmur of their voices. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was mainly her mother talking. Until the last few minutes, when the detective spoke, very quietly, for what seemed a long time.
The apartment door opened and closed. Abigail heard the detective walk down the hall. It sounded as if he were trailing his fingernails against the wall. She listened until she was sure he was going down the stairs. Then she went in to see her mother.
Joanna was sitting on the couch holding her knees, gently.
“I’m in big fucking trouble,” she said.
“What is it?”
Joanna just shook her head. Closed her eyes. Opened them. She looked as if she was going to cry.
“Is he going to send you to jail?” Abigail asked. She had a clear image of her mother stepping into a barred cell, the door closing slowly behind her. A clang of metal.
“No,” Joanna said. “He’s going to help us.”
* * *
There was initially a strange period when Detective Lawrence Garner, “Larry,” was simply Joanna’s boyfriend. For a while he showed up at the apartment two or three times a week. On more than one occasion he took Joanna and Abigail out for dinner.
“I don’t like him,” Abigail told her mother, when they’d come home from one of these uncomfortable evenings at a Korean restaurant.
“Why?” Joanna asked. “What’s wrong with him?”
“You don’t like him.”
Joanna laughed. There was a brittle brightness to her around Larry, around the subject of Larry. To Abigail it was as if her mother was terrified of something and had convinced herself that as long as she didn’t look at it then it couldn’t really be there.
“What a thing to say,” Joanna said. “Of course I like him.”
“You hate him. It’s like he stinks and you’re holding your nose.”
Joanna laughed again. It wasn’t even her real laugh. “You’re crazy,” she said.
“He hates you, too.”
“What?”
“He hates both of us. You know he does.”
Joanna’s smile faltered. Since Larry, she had a new version of the magic, the same unreliable glitteriness, but with panic right underneath it.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “He’s looking out for us.” Then she forced herself back into brightness. “I wish you’d let me cut your hair,” she said. “You look like a goddamned gypsy.”
* * *
One night not long afterward, Abigail woke in the small hours and heard her mother and Larry laughing in the living room. There was an odd atmosphere, as if the apartment were alive and had whispered something to her while she’d slept. She went to the bedroom door and opened it, carefully.
Larry was sprawled on the couch, still wearing his shoulder holster, though his red shirt was half unbuttoned, showing plump chest muscles so smooth and hard they looked plastic, like a G.I. Joe’s. He had a glass of scotch in his hand, ice cubes tinkling. Joanna was down on her knees, cutting lines of coke on the coffee table, her skirt bunched up around her waist. She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked up at him. Larry opened his mouth and curled his tongue up like a happy lizard.
* * *
School (Abigail was there more now that her mother had Larry on the scene) was an escape and an imprisonment. Escape because in spite of everything her mind went into some of the stuff. She was good at biology, math, geography. (Later she would theorize that she liked these subjects because each of them in its own way took her far away from the regular world: to the invisible molecular level; to the clean realm of numbers; to countries and people thousands of miles away.) More than anything, though, she loved literature. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Old Man and the Sea. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Pearl. She read
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter five times. Before she’d begun reading seriously, she’d assumed half her thoughts and feelings were uniquely insane. But it turned out other people had such thoughts and feelings, too. In spite of this—or perhaps because of it—she kept her mouth shut in her English class and scored lousily on her papers. For her it was private and inarticulable. While she was reading them, the books and their characters were living, fluid things. Talking and writing about them in class killed them.
So much for escape. School was an imprisonment because she had no friends and most of the teachers seemed afraid of her. They treated her as if she were a bomb that might go off if they got too close.
Ariel had abandoned her. The two of them had been to a party where Abigail had hit a guy in the head with a big glass ashtray because she’d overheard him call her mother a whore.
One strange thing happened. It was her last day of junior high. She was coming down the steps that led out into the parking lot when the strap of her shoulder bag, which had been rotting for months, snapped. The bag dropped and spat out some of its contents. Abigail got down on her haunches to retrieve them. When she stood up she saw Daniel Coulter leaning on his motorbike, watching her. Daniel was two years older. His kid sister was in the year below her. Abigail remembered Daniel in the way she remembered all the older boys who had gone on to senior high, as remote figures utterly unconnected to her. Daniel beckoned to her. As if it were a movie, Abigail found herself checking over her shoulder that there wasn’t someone else he was beckoning to. There wasn’t. Daniel grinned and repeated the gesture. She went over to him. She knew it was going to be something unpleasant, since he was cool—had been cool even two years ago—but she couldn’t stop herself.
“Anyone fucking you yet?” he asked her.
This struck her as such an outlandish question that she thought she must have misheard.
“What?” she said.
Daniel laughed. He had a glamorous face, with blue eyes and shoulder-length dark hair. A silver hoop earring.
“I said,” he repeated, smiling, “is anyone fucking you yet?”
She wanted to walk away. Her face was hot, her legs strands of chiffon. But he stared at her, full of brightness. She was confined to a terrible privacy with him.
“No,” she said.
Daniel shook his head, smiling. He glanced down at the ground, then back up at her. “Someone should be,” he said.
Abigail was speechless. She couldn’t stop staring at him.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m doing you a favor. Get your shit together. Put on some goddamned makeup. Stop dressing like a fucking tramp. Shave your pussy and come see me when you’re ready. Now exit.”
Abigail walked away. Not because she’d been told to but because her impulse to walk away finally got the better of her.
Was it a joke? No one had ever said anything like that to her before. She didn’t consider herself pretty. It was a joke. Some ruse to shame her in public. Daniel would wait until she was naked, then open the door for everyone to look and laugh. This was what she told herself.
But that night when Joanna was out with Larry, Abigail took a shower and blow-dried her long hair and put on some of her mother’s makeup. Eyeshadow, liner, mascara, bloodred nail polish and lipstick. When she’d finished she stood naked in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door.
She was slightly astonished. She was slim, and her breasts were small and firm. She had Joanna’s features and coloring, the rich blond hair and green eyes, but she’d always taken her own invisibility for granted. In her mind, Joanna’s beauty was something unrelated to her, an impenetrable phenomenon like lightning or an earthquake. Now, with the cosmetics, Abigail felt a thrilling share in it. She went to the bedroom and put on a pair of Joanna’s high heels. They were black suede, with open toes and a strap across the ankle like something a slave girl would wear. She returned to the bathroom. More astonishment. She’d never worn high heels in her life. It alarmed her that the image in the mirror was her. A different her. She looked like Joanna.
In the days that followed, she repeated this ritual often, when she was alone. Outwardly nothing changed. She never wore makeup in public. She continued to dress the way she always had, featureless jeans and tops, sneakers that looked exhausted. But she had, whether she liked it or not, a new secret to share with herself.
One evening, after performing the transformation ritual, she masturbated in front of the mirror. The resulting climax was a delicious explosion of shame. It frightened her. It frightened her because even telling herself (in the immediate profane afterglow) that she wasn’t going to do this again, she knew beyond any doubt that she certainly was going to do it again.
Which she did, the very next time she had the place to herself. It became a cloudy, wonderful addiction. For a while, each time she did it, it felt as if she were daring God to punish her. She imagined the sins like a heap of stolen coins, a dirty fortune getting bigger and bigger. But after a while she stopped thinking in that way. The heap of coins was sprawling, but she just didn’t bother about it.
* * *
That summer they moved into Larry’s first-floor apartment in Manayunk. To Abigail it seemed huge, but there was too much dark wooden furniture. The couch and armchairs were deep green vinyl. Larry had a black electronic recliner only he was allowed to sit in. She had her own room, with nothing in it but a bed, a badly put-together wardrobe, and two empty filing cabinets with rust around the edges. There were office blinds instead of curtains over a small window that looked out onto Grape Street.
Abigail spent as much time as she could out of the apartment. When she wasn’t reading she wandered the city and fantasized about leaving. She went to the Schuylkill River, since the water gave her the sense of a route into distant openness. The leaving fantasies had a treacherous duality. They began with her and her mother on a bus, pulling away from the city with a feeling of millions of tiny threads tearing. There would be hot coffee and icy sandwiches, dusty sunlight and the bus’s wheezing gears, signs saying West. Freeways and eventually prairies; soft, giant sunsets. Intercut with this footage, flashes of Larry coming home, seeing they’d gone, raging, gradually realizing his helplessness. But the fantasies that began this way always morphed into a version in which, by the end of the journey, Joanna had disappeared and Abigail got down from the bus in a strange city alone. When she imagined this, the feeling was of waking from a dream, as if her mother had never been with her on the bus at all and she’d made the entire trip by herself.
* * *
One evening she came home from the river and heard her mother and Larry talking in the kitchen. They hadn’t heard her come in.
“This is going to be something fucked up,” Joanna said. “Otherwise why the big money?”
“It’s not going to be anything fucked up,” Larry said. “I told you: This is a solid guy. I know this guy.” His voice sounded different. Softer. Full of gentle reasonableness. “Plus, he’s not dumb. He knows me.”
“I really don’t feel like it, baby. Really.”
There was a pause. Abigail stood perfectly still.
“Look,” Larry said. “Just go to dinner. He wants to take you to dinner. If you get the wrong vibe, just get up and walk out of there, no sweat. Absolutely no sweat.”
“I just … Why do you want me to do this?”
“I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do, Christ, you know that. But I’m in a cash-flow jam right now. I’m in a tight spot and this would really help me out. It’ll help us out. This guy is loaded.”
Another pause. Then the sound of a chair moving slightly and the creak of Larry’s leather jacket. Abigail heard her mother sigh. Abigail could picture Larry with his hands resting on her mother’s hips. He had a habit of doing that, then sliding his right hand up and gently squeezing the back of her neck in a soft massaging movement that always made Joanna close her eyes and let her whole body go loose.
“The
kid’s gonna need new stuff when school starts next month,” he said. “You said yourself you’re sick of her walking around looking like a goddamned homeless person. I mean I’m doing what I can here, but … You know?”
“I thought you said you were working on a deal?”
“I am, but it takes time. And money. I got two more mouths to feed, after all. Say you’ll do it.”
“Jesus,” Joanna said. Then sighed again. “Dinner first. And if anything feels wrong—”
“You don’t like it, you walk. I’ll be close by, I promise.”
Abigail tiptoed back to the front door. Opened it and closed it, loudly, as if she’d just come in.
* * *
She hadn’t realized how glad she’d been that her mother had stopped fucking men for money. The relief had been eclipsed by her loathing of Larry, whom her mother was fucking not for money but because she was afraid of him—which was worse. But when Abigail saw Joanna getting ready to go out one evening a few days later and understood that the date of the arranged dinner had arrived, all the desolation of her childhood came back, and with it, this time, a fresh ache for her mother and, weirdly, a disgust with herself.
“Don’t do it,” she said.
Joanna was getting ready in front of the mirror. She was wearing a white halter-neck dress and her hair was pinned up, with two artful long blond curls dangling down each cheek. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Don’t do it,” Abigail repeated. “You don’t have to do this anymore.”
Silence.
“Mom?”
“Leave me alone, will you, for Christ’s sake. You have no idea.”